This invention relates to sintered alloys for decoration, having both decorativeness and wear resistance, suitable for decorative members such as external parts for watches, tiepins, brooches, parts for fishing tackles and so on.
For decorative members that are required to have corrosion resistance and to be scratch proof, sintered alloys utilizing WC, TaC and TiC as base materials have been put to practical use. Among these, the WC base and TaC base sintered alloys are unsuitable for portable decorations on account of high cost and great specific gravity, and they have the defect that they cannot satisfy requirements for decorative effects completely, because of having simple blackish gray colors. In order to improve the decorativeness, steels or sintered alloys coated with TiN and/or TiC have been used. These coated alloys, however, still have disadvantages of impairing decorative value. For exmple, there are disadvantages of tone difference between inside and outside of the coated alloys because of the nonuniformities of coating properties and thickness of coating film which are brought about during manufacturing processes. Further, a great number of sintered alloys including TiN as a main component have been proposed to comprise colored sintered alloy members for decoration, but they are very bad in sintering effect. Since such alloys having poor sintering effect are not suitable for decorative members even if a polishing treatment such as lapping will be undergone. Therefore, they have not been put to practical use yet.
The sintered alloy for decoration according to this invention has now been accomplished in order to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks and problems.